Sunday, July 20, 2008

It started out innocently enough. About a year and half ago, at the company Christmas party, Sr. VP of Holtzbrinck, Fritz Foy, came up with a notion to create a "river of conversation, art, and fiction" within the sf/f community. At the time it was (or at least I thought it was) to be a cute little side project between him, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and myself, but as we flushed it out and excitement grew it evolved into a full-on "Digital Initiative."

Early in the process, our president, Brian Napak, told us to go home and do a word association exercise -- think of ten words that should embody Tor.com. I was the first to roll my eyes and never got around to it, but others did, and "genuine" and "authentic" kept raising to top. Anytime we started to steer off course during development, we repeated the mantra "genuine" and it always cleared the way. Hopefully that comes across in the final (and yet ever evolving) product.

Which is to say...I hope we have built a place where we can share the things we genuinely enjoy. We will fill it with new fiction and art, and some interesting bloggers, but the real fun will be in what the members make of it. Stop in, shape and take over the conversation, jump into threads already started or start your own, fill your profiles with pictures and art. In short: Make yourself at home.

I think I can speak for the team and say that we have put together something we are all very proud of. As the project grew it included many more people than we started with - some new to me that will remain life-long friends, and others that I've worked with for years and my respect and admiration for them has only grown. Mazal tov to everyone in the band: Fritz, Patrick, Teresa, Jamie, Megan, Bridget, Liz, Pablo, Dave, Larry, Richard, Faith, Gina, the folks at Tridian, Carey, Mina...I hope I'm not forgetting anyone.

Lastly, but not least of all, a tremendous amount of thanks and gratitude goes out to my full staff. They have picked up much more than their fair share of our workload, making up for the shinny distractions of Tor.com. Thank you and I have not forgotten about our lunch!

8 comments:

It's an amazing site, something that's been lacking online. The conversations are already really interesting and the whole thing is a delight to look at. It's more than I had expected. I've posted a link from my blog and I'll spread the word. The fiction is great too.

Wow. Looks like you guys are neck deep in this critter. I'll have to poke around. (I still suffer from a syndrome identified by Douglas Adams a while back: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/32664.html